Incorrect Claims in Last Week’s Letters to Editor

Editor, 

In last week’s Forum, Mr. Lindstrom makes the unsubstantiated claim “in the UK the violent crime rate is actually twice as high as ours”.  Since “violent crime rate” is defined differently for each country, it is conceivable that we could come up with this statistic.  However, if we take a statistic which is more clearly defined, like “intentional homicide”, we see that the US has over 4 times as many intentional homicides per capita. (5.3 per 100,000 people in the US, versus 1.2 per 100,000 people in UK, per the 2017 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.)

I do not claim that the reason that you are less likely to be killed in the UK than in the US is correlated with gun laws, but I take issue with the statistic claimed by Mr. Lindstrom to support his argument.

Also in last week’s Forum, Mr. Owen makes the claim “COVID is now less deadly then (sic) the seasonal flu.”  This is incorrect.  In the United States, there were approximately 20,000 deaths from influenza (flu) in the 2019-2020 season (according to the Centers for Disease Control), compared to 815,000 deaths from COVID-19.  Last year U.S. citizens were statistically 40 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than the flu.

–C. Conrad Cady, Castro Valley